This invention relates to a hydrocarbon reforming process utilizing a lead/chloride/alumina catalyst.
It has long been known to use an alumina base containing platinum and a halogen for the reforming of gasoline fractions such as the higher boiling part of the straight run gasoline contained naturally in crude oil and the heavy gasoline fraction boiling between about 180 to 400.degree. F in a full range gasoline produced by cat cracking. These materials inherently have a research octane number (RON) clear of less than about 90 and must be reformed to produce a product having a higher RON by increasing the aromatic content of the reformate. One of the factors which has limited the use of catalytic reforming has been the excessive formation of light gases such as methane, ethane, propane, ethylene, propylene and butenes. Thus there is a need for an inexpensive catalyst system which is effective in producing large amounts of aromatics so as to raise the RON without significant formation of light gases. Hydrogenationdehydrogenation catalysts, for example, are undersirable since in the presence of hydrogen they would cause hydrogenation of the olefins contained in the gasoline to paraffins thus resulting in the production of gasoline having lowered RON values rather than higher values.